Our Altar to False Gods
by simplyprologue
Summary: Laura Roslin had meant to die alone. Takes place between Res Ship II and Epiphanies.


**A/N: **I had started to write this awhile ago, during finals, and never really found the strength of mind to finish it. It's a strange piece, very prose-y, very little dialogue. I just enjoy playing around in Laura's head, because I think she's one of the few fictional characters I can really empathize with on a fundamental level. (Also if anyone is wondering if I have more BSG fic, I do... but most of it is on AO3 and livejournal due to it's MA rating.)

Takes place between _Resurrection Ship II_ and _Epiphanies_.

Thanks to tumblr user **headtrip-honey** for the beta.

* * *

She threatens to shake herself apart, a splitting atom, or the heaving revenant of a star in its death throes; but he holds her together even here, in the black of space. She too will soon become a part of the void, and he will hold the fleet together in her absence. It is only her stardust that he will have to remember her by; their fragile, fleeting friendship comprised of half-touches and half-truths bent to fit the shape of lies and smiles and bookends. He holds her now, with her good days behind her, in a way she finds both comforting and disquieting.

Laura Roslin had meant to die alone.

She does not know what to make of the fact that she will die with Bill Adama holding her hand. What, with time, would she allow herself to think of him? It is a half-formed fantasy; she wants to die warm, at least, in the bellows of love's creation.

His arms are warm around her, and he is solid. Stoic and stolid, her Admiral William Adama. They lay drifting in the place where it starts; she, a star dropped into the palm of his hand, an escaping light that not even he, for all that Adama means to her, could tether. Besides, it was never his job to make her stay. She had already been dying from the start.

She had been cold—that much she remembers. It had been the tail-end of the meeting and she had shivered and his eyes had been too soft, his fingers wrapped too carefully around her own. And here they are now; his chest is too sturdy under her flattened palms, the rise and fall too much what she needs right now to allow herself to let him stay. He will live. He will live for years; he will be healthy and strong. It is all she can allow herself to need him to be.

"Better?" Bill asks, his mouth pressed near her hairline.

Laura nods, and lets him rub his hands up and down the sides of her spine—slowly, carefully, and in a way that feels too nice, almost pleasant, even with the sickness curling in wait under her skin, waiting to consume her nerves and withering sinews. Instead the sickness coils in her joints, the throbbing ache easing under his fingers assured touch.

_I was cold, and weak, and he kissed me._

He cannot make her strong, not at this late hour. Laura does not quite know what he makes her.

_He makes me warm._ She will not think of the rest.

"Better," she replies, and lets herself burrow deeper into him. Her pounding headache makes the race towards her death, every tick of the clock, slowed;makes every gentle touch magnified.

Billy knows to stay away, the perceptive boy. The curtain to her quarters is drawn tightly, the lights low. Bill gives her only the room to breathe, hands sweeping up to brush through her hair. How had they arrive here, in this moment? —curled up together on her cot, his boots off and his jacket unbuttoned, her hands slipped under the wool and her fingers stroking the soft cotton of his undershirt. His breath on her temple, one of his arms under her head and the other over her waist.

She had been so cold, and then…

It hardly matters how they got here. She knows how, and she knows it will be over before they truly get anywhere; this is no temporary illness, and his fingers trace the curve of her spine with a slow kind of desperation, a savoring kind of despair.

The ghosts that they know—and she, soon to be among them—flicker from view. But he will hold her for as long as she likes. She will not be dying tonight, and she can build an altar to false gods of life yet, if only to tear down their benefices in the morning when she once again is cold and he has gone back to his Olympus.

He had kissed her (and she kissed him back, her tired lips pressed soft and slow against his) and they haven't spoken of it. Should they? She barely knows him at all, Laura thinks. Why start talking now?

They have crafted a strange intimacy; they do not know each other outside of this apocalypse. Perhaps it doesn't matter. She will live and die here, in the after of the worlds. This is all that will be remembered of her. She finds that she does not mind, not if it is Bill who will be the one remembering her, building her ghost.

Laura forces herself into the present, to where his lips press against her hairline and where his hands boldly learn the shallow curve of her waist. There's nothing left to say, really. She knew the look that was in his eyes when he came to her tonight.

(She also knows, quite well, quite carefully, what was absent in hers. She cannot do this to him. But she needs him, now. She does not have the strength to make him leave, but she does have the strength to play at remaining platonic.)

She clings tightly to him, to life, to Earth, no longer believing that she will be the one to lead them home, but that she is still the price to be Roslin has always become what was necessary. And now she will become a human sacrifice. Hers is not the first blood spilt for the gods—and sacrifice has no meaning if there is nothing to be lost.

He loves her, more than any of the gods he doesn't believe in.

Dying was never going to be now, Laura realizes—as he breathes in the scent of her hair, building the memory so that he can construct the finest bones of her ghost—it has a cost.

Only being able to have the barest taste of is crueler than actually having would have been; but they cannot have this, cannot do this. It is late, and they can only have this, here, for these short few hours. He will not kiss her again, they will not talk about kisses or dances or meaningful looks. It is an extravagance that they cannot afford; Laura needs him to carry on once she is gone.

It is not the ache of cancer that wracks her, or fear. He sighs against her, holding her tighter. He is afraid, and she needs him not to be. She rationalizes, curling herself into him—he needs this. He needs something to remember her by.

_I could have loved you_, she thinks, threatening to shake herself apart.

And he will never know what that would have meant.

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**


End file.
